From Health Care Renewal: Commercial, and Dangerous, CME

Over on our friends the Health Care Renewal blog, Bernard Carroll posted this important message:
http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2010/10/thats-education.html

Dr. Carroll looks in detail at a single commercial CME offering in psychiatry, an apparently innocent (even if hardly earthshattering) chat between two prominent academic psychiatrists on mood disorders. He shows, first, how this program that is ostensibly about the physician-patient relationship manages to get in a number of "soft" messages promoting the drugs made by the two sponsoring firms. Second, and probably more important, he noted a slide that gives incorrect and indeed dangerous information about a set of little-used antidepressants (MAO inhibitors). This dangerous and incorrect content is contained in a program that features two academically highly-qualified psychiatrists and that is officially spopnsored by the Purdue College of Pharmacy. In short, the internal quality control within this medical "education" enterprise seems to be about the same as the quality control in GlaxoSmithKline's Puerto Rican manufacturing plant (latest post).

Upcoming Conference: Industry-Funded CME

Message from our esteemed colleague, Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman of PharmedOut fame:


Please help us publicize our conference, "Prescription for Conflict:
Should Industry Fund Continuing Medical Education?" This is an issue that is critical to patients, providers and health care systems. While our primary audience is physicians, nurses, and other health care providers (6 CEU credits are available, and 5 CME credits are pending), it will be of interest to diverse groups, including educators, regulators, policymakers, ethicists, consumer activists, and students.
Our conference website for has just been updated. We have a new flyer , suitable for posting, available at http://www.pharmedout.org/RxforConflictFlyer1pg.pdf ; the updated agenda is at http://www.pharmedout.org/conferenceagenda.htm.
Thank you!
--
Adriane Fugh-Berman MD
Department of Physiology and Biophysics
Georgetown University Medical Center
Box 571460
Washington DC 20057-1460